


Thunder Rolled a Six

by Derry Rain (smakibbfb)



Category: Ready or Not (2019)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:46:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28136412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smakibbfb/pseuds/Derry%20Rain
Summary: Grace isn’t sure how long it has been since the wedding when Le Bail turns up in her kitchen. It feels somewhere between three days and thirty years and she hasn’t been outside quite often enough to note the passage of time.
Comments: 16
Kudos: 64
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Thunder Rolled a Six

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lionessvalenti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lionessvalenti/gifts).



Grace isn’t sure how long it has been since the wedding when Le Bail turns up in her kitchen. It feels somewhere between three days and thirty years and she hasn’t been outside quite often enough to note the passage of time. It’s early, too early to be awake, probably, but sleep too seems to have given up on her for the time being. It’s close enough to day, she thinks, and gets out of bed.

There isn’t any question of not recognising him. She pads into the room in a pair of ancient socks and one of Alex’s old t-shirts and he’s _there_ , sitting quietly at her countertop, smiling a beatific smile which makes her immediately want to throw up. She hovers in the doorway for a moment, a minute, two minutes, until her skin itches with tension, and she can’t help but move forward. 

Le Bail does not look away from her approach. 

“Okay, creepy,” Grace says, by way of greeting. She slumps down onto a nearby stool, affecting a relaxation she does not feel, and stretches out the fingers of her good hand to flick a half-full cigarette packet in her direction. “Figures you’d show up. What do you want?”

Le Bail reaches over, places one hand on top of her own and she fights the urge to pull away, determined not to show any sign of weakness. His skin is gnarled, puckered, like scar tissue, and she can feel the shine of it, almost slick against her own. 

“The question is,” Le Bail says, voice dripping bloodied petals against the countertop, “what is it that _you_ want, Grace Le Domas?”

“You should know that’s not my name,” Grace says. Le Bail curls his fingers around her hand, his thumb resting, gentle, in her palm. She wrinkles her nose.

“For the purposes of this covenant,” he says, “it might as well be.”

He smiles. Grace does not.

“Come on,” she says, “I won.”

“You did,” he agrees, genially.

“So?”

“ _So_ , so did the Le Domases, many times.” Le Bail taps a too-long fingernail of his free hand against the counter. “If our deal was to end after the first game, that would have been so dreadfully dull.”

Grace puffs out her cheeks and blows a deep breath into the room. “I have not had enough coffee for this.”

A cup is pressed into her hands before she is finished speaking. She frowns, and does not remember Le Bail moving his own hand away. The scent of bitter coffee and spice wafts into her nostrils. It is not the way she likes it, but it’s familiarity startles her; it is the way Alex always made it. She takes a sip, without breaking eye contact. If he had wanted her dead, she reasons, she might already be a bloodied smear in a burning mansion, just like the others. The thought does not comfort her. 

Le Bail’s smile seems to widen as the coffee flows warm down her throat, and something of an old story nags at the back of her thoughts. _Pomegranates,_ she remembers. But this? This is just coffee. She drinks it anyway.

“I wasn’t in it for the money,” she says, after a few moments. “My lawyer’s pretty confident I’ll get it though.”

“You will,” Le Bail says. His expressive affability is beginning to make her toes cramp. “All of it, and more if you’d like it.”

“Also, I don’t know shit about running a company,” she adds. 

“There are people for that. You would not need to do a thing, my dear.”

Grace places the cup on the counter between them, rests her bandaged hand over the top of it, willing herself not to shiver. She holds herself tense, is almost surprised that the cup does not break beneath her grip. Silence wreathes itself around the pair of them until her voice comes, unbidden, back to her throat.

“You would have let me keep him,” she says. It’s not a question. Alex had believed it. She had known it was true. The corners of Le Bail’s mouth turn up slightly and he shrugs. 

“I might have let you keep them all, if you’d really wanted it,” he tells her. He sighs, heavily, dramatically, and utterly devoid of any movement that might have belied a real emotion behind the action. “It is a shame, really. They were quite fun, you know. I especially liked-” His lip is caught between his teeth for a moment, and Grace isn’t sure if she is imagining the thin pop of blood beneath an edge too just slightly sharp to be human. “ _Rebecca_. I liked Rebecca. There was something so elegant about her.” He shrugs. “Rules are rules, however. And even I must play by them.”

“Do you though?”

“Of course.” 

There is a momentary flicker of a frown on his features; Grace does not miss the movement, watches in interest as the man, or the thing that is masquerading as a man, smooths away the first small hint of something that looks like real emotion. A light clicks on somewhere in the dark recess of her mind.

“I just want to help you,” Le Bail says, soothing and suffocating, a feather pillow pressed against her face. “You proved that you were so much more than _any_ of them. You’re different, Grace. Something new. You would not waste my gifts on petty things. Why not change the world?”

From somewhere - nowhere - everywhere around her, Grace can hear the sound of children laughing, can almost see shadowed shapes running across her kitchen floor. Though her rational brain tells her there is nothing there, she can see in her mind’s eye Emilie Le Domas, swinging her son into the air, sees Fitch, wrapping his arms around his wife. Sees Tony, Charity, heads bowed deep in conversation she can't hear more than a whisper of. For a moment, she wonders where Daniel is, and cannot quite stop herself from looking around for him. 

It is, of course, not Daniel’s eyes she finds. She shakes herself and the vision fades.

“I’ve seen _Saw_ ,” she tells Le Bail. “Like, at least four of them. The people who claim they’re playing by the rules almost never are. So forgive me if I’m not leaping to believe you.”

His eyes flash at her, a red-black magma crust, and Grace begins to feel the tension in her shoulders ebb away. 

She remembers her skin tightening as her husband’s blood dried on it, the smell of booze on Daniel’s breath, the cloud of smoke from Becky’s lips. The sensations wrap themselves around her like a protective shield, and she almost, _almost_ begins to relax. There’s a shift in power here, and she scents it in the sulphur; she doesn’t have to wonder if Le Bail does too. 

“You need something from me,” she says, voice bright with the dawning understanding. “You’re talking big, but I _won_. I wasn’t supposed to do that. What, does that mean you’re down your soul quota? Suddenly feeling the pressure from the big boys upstairs?” She tilts her head, considering. “Downstairs,” she amends.

Le Bail is leaning forward, fingers steepled. He’s not smiling anymore. Grace, on the other hand, feels something a little like a laugh bubbling in the depths of her chest. “I ruined your cushy little deal,” she says. “And you need to make another one.” She does laugh then, loud and only half-faking it for his discomfort. “Or maybe you just _want_ to. Maybe you just don’t want to be _beaten_.” She leans both elbows on the counter. “Maybe you’re the old widow, in the drawing room, with the axe. Question is, are you going to get me, or…” She leans back, mimes an explosion in the air. 

“I need nothing from you,” Le Bail sniffs, but Grace isn’t fooled. She laughs again, warmer this time, and rises from the stool she has been sitting on. She feels his eyes on her as she walks over to the coffee machine, pulls out her favourite mug from the cupboard.

“Truth is,” she says, as the machine begins its regular morning routine. “I’m not particularly inclined to give you anything either. Not a goat, not a husband. And especially not me. Honestly, I’m all set.”

“I could take everything from you,” Le Bail says. There is no softness left in his voice now, no softness, and no _power_. Grace doesn’t bother turning round.

“No,” she says. “All you can take is the prize money.” She starts spooning sugar into the coffee as the mug fills slowly; and a memory of a raised eyebrow and a laughing kiss pressed against her temple crashes against her. “Don't you remember? I didn’t care about that the first time round.”

She waits until the light on the coffee machine flicks from red to green before she turns around again.

Le Bail is gone.

“Sore fucking loser,” she says, and raises her hand in a toast to the empty seat.


End file.
